Rashid's Weblog Updates

Drive By 7.31.2008 (My Life)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 7/31/2008 7:38:07 AM

- Another training week is upon me. This time it's the PeopleSoft Integration Broker - pretty complicated stuff. If you're keeping score, this would be the fifth course I've taken this year and I still have at least three to go. By the end of this summer I will have a PhD from Oracle University. Fortunately I'm in Atlanta for this one though I had a scare that I might have to go to Westchester Illinois.

As I noted while training in Chicago, the diversity continues in this class. There are people hailing from Iran, India, Bosnia, China, Russia, and I suspect another southeast Asian country. More interesting in this case is that In this - highly technical - class, eight of the twelve participants are women. I've never seen such a thing. They run the gamut of titles too from Architects, to Analysts, to SysAdmins. That this might be a sign of women making inroads into the industry does nothing but please me as 1) the IT industry is as close to a meritocracy as any other and 2) there are few professions that could use an estrogen influx like ours.

- I really like smart women. I don't date much because I rarely meet women that don't bore me after the third conversation. In my training class I am surrounded by smart women but, of course, they are all from out of town. That got me thinking, I haven't really dated a woman that was born in the USA since 1997. Then again it's like I said, I don't date much but, over the past few months I have ratcheted up my aggressiveness with very intriguing results. More on this later... I think.

- The last time I remember the Braves playing as badly as they are now I was living in Macon Georgia. That was before I started High School.

- Rashid's Japanese-style fried rice recipe

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to assume that you know how to prepare rice, scramble eggs, and brown chicken.

1 cup of rice
2 eggs
3 chicken tenderloins
1/2 white onion
1/2 green pepper
1 tblsp butter
1/2 tsp minced garlic

1) Start the rice
2) Dice the onion and peppers
3) Cut the chicken into small pieces no more than 1/2 inch wide
4) Scramble the eggs
5) Put a little cooking oil in your favorite skiller/wok/cooking surface and start to brown the chicken over medium-high heat
6) Once the chicken is brown, mix in the cooked rice, onions, eggs and stir
7) Microwave the butter and garlic for 30 seconds, when done, stir it in with the rice
8) Continue to stir and season with salt and pepper for 5-7 minutes

And you're done! This recipe will serve two easily. Stir fried veggies will go well with this.

- Big shout out to the guy that found my wallet - which I apparently dropped while sprinting for cover when the sky opened up on me yesterday while walking from the MARTA station - and gave it to the cops. Did I tell you about the time a few years ago that I lost a $100 bill and somebody returned it?

- So I wrote a recap of my Chicago trip in June and it's like a freaking novel. What an amazing trip.

- The new site will be both a resounding victory and crushing defeat. When you know what this phase of my life has been like, you know that it couldn't turn out any other way.

- A few music videos from days gone by:

Oh Yeah - Rottin Razkals I have been hunting this video down for years but kept coming up short because I was "misspelling" the name of the group. Those illtown cats sure could bring the hooks.

Whutcha Want - Nine Another clip from One hit Wonderland.

I Got Cha Opin - Black Moon One of the illest hip hop remixes ever from one of the illest hip hop albums - sonically if not thematically - ever.

- If you know of any programmers with a good PeopleSoft and Object Oriented Analysis / Design background (.NET/J2EE/web are all huge pluses but not mandatory) shoot me an email. I'm looking (vacancy 0600509).

Political Drive By 7.23.2008 (Commentary / Rants)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 7/23/2008 9:50:38 PM

I'm in another world. Real fast comments on some random stuff, some old, some... older. Let's roll.

UPDATE (7/27/2008): Watching the Sunday morning shows, McCain and the Republicans are all but claiming victory in Iraq based on the success of the surge. Seriously. Stay tuned.

UPDATE (7/28/2008): Here is some real information on the Surge. Choice quote:

The troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential. That the troops were used in new ways by Gen. Petraeus was more important. But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by accidentally turning it into a Shiite city [via Shia ethnic cleansing - RZM], as Shiite as Isfahan or Tehran, and thus a terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement could not hope to fight effectively.

On Phil Gramm

Money Quote from the Washington Times article:

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. "We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet."

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline" despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

Hell yeah America is a nation of whiners. I bet you didn't hear a lot of whining in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany (yes I've just set a new Rashid Muhammad Dot Com record for invoking Goodwin's law). Ultimately women's suffrage and the Civil Rights movement were big whinefests. Even pointing this out is whining. Whining is kind of a byproduct of freedom of speech so we deal with it because the alternative sucks more. More importantly, if a person thinks that their lot in life is unfair, prepare for the waaaaahbulance. It's amazing how much trouble the unremarkable truth can get you into during the "silly season."

On mental recession. I think that this is an interesting statement. I mean all economists don't agree on what exactly constitutes a recession but it's generally accepted that two quarters of negative growth fits the bill. Regular people are not economists though, and it's not like a recession is some normal and evenly distributed phenomenon throughout the economy. For me personally, I don't drive and I get several lucrative job solicitations for which I am extremely qualified every single week - recession is the last thing on my mind. That doesn't mean that there is no recession. Also, recessions - like most things subject to the judgment and emotions of humans - have a lot to do with perception. So if a lot of people have it in their head that their employer might be cutting back, that will materially affect their behavior. Also, 1 percent growth is nothing to write home about with gas prices driving inflation as they are. There could definitely be a case made for negative growth on just those two metrics.

War

I said that I was voting purely on foreign policy this year and over the last few weeks I have become convinced that I am backing the right candidate. If you parse the conversation between the two big party candidates it goes like this:

McCain: Surge. Surge. Surge. I told Bush that he should have sent more troops and now that he has sent more troops we are on track to win this war in Iran... err Iraq. Surge. Surge. Surge. Win. Win. Win. Obama = Surrender. Obama = Surrender. Sprinkled throughout this conversation are assertions that the Generals on the ground in Iraq know best and that Mr.McCain knows "How to Win Wars"

Obama: Iraq was a misstep, the fight is in Afghanistan and Pakistan.The Iraqi government and people need to step up to take ownership of their destiny and as long as we have an open-ended commitment there, the impetus for them to do so is mitigated.

Comments:

1) Bonus comment. President Bush and his crew - including McCain - have been going on and on for years about how they aren't going to fight a war based on public opinion. That's a completely understandable and reasonable notion, but it doesn't really work in a Constitutional Federal Republic. If the conflict is sustained and the people don't approve, you and your group will get voted out and you jeopardize what you meant to achieve plus you essentially throw away billions of dollars in the process. Could that be why the only sustained conflicts we've "won" since Vietnam have been by proxy?

2) It's funny to me that Senator Obama exhibits more knowledge about the management aspects of the President's job than Senator McCain. I say that because Obama mainly talks about the strategy of the Global War on Terror where McCain mainly talks about Iraq and the surge. This makes sense because they are playing to their "strengths" (Obama against Iraq, McCain for the surge). It amuses me when McCain falls all over himself to tout his support for higher troops levels as some sort of strategic coup when - in the context of the GWoT - the surge is clearly a tactical change. The strategy was what made us put Afghanistan on the back burner and target Iraq to begin with, tactically mitigating the fallout from a strategic mistake is just that. This is why I get annoyed when McCain goes on and on about how Obama should listen to General Petraeus and the "commanders on the ground." Petraeus is the man in charge of Iraq and, as such, does not (or at least should not) have the responsibility of developing a qualified opinion on anything other than Iraq. That's like relying on your Chinese sales manager to give you advice on how to do things in all of Asia.

This reality will change when Petraeus becomes CENTCOM Commander, but it is not the case now therefore the tying of GWoT strategy to Iraqi commanders is lame and honestly, I think that visiting Iraq could do more harm than good. I say that because unless you plan on spending a lot of time going all over Iraq and getting a statistically representative sample of the conditions there, whatever you see is not going to be enough to make any sort of objective determination of the entire picture. At any given time, the worst neighborhoods in America can look pretty calm and vice versa. I haven't seen anything to indicate that McCain has taken this approach with his trips.

3) Does anybody else find it uproariously hilarious that the "personal responsibility" / anti-welfare crowd is so agreeable to open-ended nation building?

4) Is Iraq really a war? I mean we went in and took out a skeleton crew of a military in a couple of months and have essentially been engaged in an occupation + counterinsurgency for five years. If it is a war, how exactly do you win it and, more importantly, how in the heck does John McCain know? Isn't the GWoT supposed to be some new 21st century war? His claim to fame is getting shot down and doing five years during the most embarrassing butt whipping in American history. What wars have we won in the 20 years he has been on the Senate Armed Services committee? When somebody says that they know how to do something I generally assume that they have done it successfully. More importantly, I don't expect them to have been associated with policies that have largely been unmitigated failures - that is if actually eliminating threats is how such things are measured. If it weren't for the economically retarding effects of Communism, I shudder to think of where we might be right now.

The same could be said for myriad Democratic policies but I'm not voting on those issues this year. I have a lot more to say on this but I'll save for later.

Oh what the heck, we can talk about one...

Gas Insanity

Not long ago, Karl Rove wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about Senators McCain and Obama pandering on oil - McCain with his gas tax holiday and Obama with his oil profits windfall tax. Rove was dead on here. I think it's worth nothing that the lack of support for the gas tax holiday by economists is pretty overwhelming as opposed to the windfall tax simply being a bad idea but they both still suck. Obama's probably more so.

The windfall tax could at least serve the purpose of decreasing demand which could have a positive effect as opposed to the gas tax holiday which would almost certainly raise demand and prices with it. Regardless, the windfall tax wasn't proposed with decreasing demand in mind, as a matter of fact, it was proposed with the idea of funding other energy initiatives. I think that taxing oil companies to do this is stupid for a number of reasons but primarily because, like all taxes and government mandates in general, this one will ultimately get passed on to the consumer. It's like the social security con where they tell you that you "split" the cost with your employer. You don't split a damn thing, your employer's "share" is costed as part of your salary. I think the tax is also a bad idea because it essentially ties funding for these alternative energy initiatives to gas prices, which only serves to reinforce the situation we've seen for so many years where we have a commitment to this cause while prices are providing tangible pain, but no dedication - or funding in this case - when it's not an immediately pressing matter. No cookie for Obama.

I believe that conventional wisdom on the current political situation is wrong. I think that the Republican policies are probably better long term for the economy and Democrat policies are better long term on defense and foreign relations. These respective policies focus more on being innovative and macro-aware as opposed to narrow-minded and tethered to the status quo. There is a lot of suck on both sides here to be sure but, this year I have to go with the Dems.

I have to say though, if I wasn't being so pragmatic and singularly focused, I would probably write in Ron Paul.

Artistic Awesomeness - Cameron Crowe (Entertainment)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 7/5/2008 3:09:38 PM

Cameron Crowe is a gifted screen writer / director that has a deft appreciation for the complexity of human relationships - and music. I have seen four of the six films he has directed and enjoyed them all. While sometimes perilously teetering over the ledge of the canyon of chick flicky sap largess, he always reins in the proceedings before they fall over.

Crowe is probably best known for the 1996 film Jerry Maguire and we can thank him - as the film's writer - for comfortably worn pop-isms such as: "Show me the money," "you complete me," "help me help you," and "you had me at hello" (my personal fave was "are you Hootie?"). While Maguire is a first-class film that I would recommend to anyone, there is one scene from his criminally ~~underrated~~ under appreciated film Almost Famous that serves as a perfect illustration of everything that I love about his work.

I wouldn't really recommend it if you haven't seen the film but, I'm just like that. It will make sense either way. Enjoy.

Almost Famous - Airplane Scene

The Blessings of a Weak Dollar (Commentary / Rants)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 6/25/2008 9:47:42 AM

Lots on my mind, but I wanted to get this out quickly.

For everybody complaining about the weak dollar - and there are a lot of you out there - consider this:

The weak dollar makes goods priced in US dollars a good deal for consumers with stronger currencies - mainly Europe and Asia. This is one of the myriad reasons why oil is going up in price. Oil is priced in US dollars, which makes it relatively cheap for a large number of foreign consumers and drives up demand.

There is a bright side however.

Foreign demand for goods priced in US dollars is working to rectify our trade deficit by increasing demand for US produced goods. Arguably more importantly though, is that increased oil prices has dramatically driven up the price of shipping goods to the US from foreign countries, making the outsourcing of manufacturing a more expensive proposition and increasing the incentive for increasing domestic production - e.g. paying Americans to do these jobs.

If every action causes an equal and opposite reaction, then the key to success is finding the positive in every negative and exploiting it. Unfortunately, much of our national conversation is focused around fighting against the negative to preserve what is familiar - much like a swimmer fighting against a rip current. Don't be surprised if this type of thinking leads us to a similar fate.

I say, let's neutralize the energy of the current (swimming perpendicular to the shore) or use its energy (swimming with the current) to take us to the Blue Ocean.

From the Chi - 6.10.2008 (My Life)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 6/10/2008 4:16:32 PM

Random thoughts

- So today I went to the world famous Billy Goat Tavern for lunch. This is how the exchange between me and the order taker guy went:

Rashid: Yeah I'll have a burger ($2.95).
OTG: A double ($4.75) is better!
Rashid: No I'll have a single burger.
OTG: A double is better!!
Rashid: Dude, you're lucky I'm excepting my beef restrictions to eat at this place, I want a SINGLE BURGER.
OTG: Ok ok. (looks to back) SINGLE BURGER!
Rashid: So do you guys sell fries?
OTG: No! Chips only! That's why a double is better!
Rashid: Huh?

The burger was mediocre at best, good thing I didn't square it.

- Last night I went up to Wrigleyville with one of my classmates. Pretty cool part of town though. I'm interested in checking it out on gameday - if you're keeping score, that is Wednesday. I don't know if I've ever seen so many sports bars clumped together at night. I think that we had dinner in the gay part of town. I mildly flirted with the waitress (I was on my best behavior in Vegas and San Fran, give me a break here) and she was just eating it up. What was it that Eddie Murphy said about a cracker to a starving person?

It's great that the train drops you off right in front of the stadium. The fact that I am in awe of such a thing is just as sad a commentary about Atlanta public transit. I have a CTA pass so I hope to do some serious exploration as the week progresses. For all of the beauty that immediately surrounds me, it's a pretty stuffy part of town.

- The dude that I was hanging with was a pure database geek and I ran some of my recent radical database design methods past him. He was skeptical, but by the time the (lengthy) conversation was over, the only complaints that he had concerned referential integrity - or lack thereof - in the database layer.

He was right but, I knew that going in, and determined long ago it was a cost that I could accept.

- I plan on strolling over to Millennium Park after I leave class today. I saw the Jay Pritzker Pavilion from the Sears Tower on my last trip here, but I wasn't in control of my destiny so I've spent the last few years longing to see this architectural marvel up close.

- The Oracle University training center is on the 16th floor of a skyscraper with an incredible view of the city. It's hard to pay attention for looking out the window and marveling at the architectural splendor. Donald Trump has a very tall building coming up next door.

- Me and the Cubs fans in my class have been going at it. Today they tried to rub in Atlanta's road record. I swore on the glove of Alex Gonzalez that the Cubs wouldn't make it past the LDS.

- There is a film called Public Enemies being shot right next to my hotel. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are both on hand. They have a caravan of old school gangster cars lining the streets. It's amazing how they can make it the span of one block look like another world with thousands of onlookers in the middle of Rush Hour.

- The class is really diverse. There are whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, Latinos, women and men all united in the pursuit of learning PeopleTools.

Kumbayah All

My Kind of Town (My Life)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 6/8/2008 9:52:12 PM

I'm behind on everything - especially sleep. To make matters worse, I'm writing this from a hotel in downtown Chicago. Seems like I was behind on working out my Peoplesoft training schedule and didn't realize that I had to get to the Chi for training til the middle of last week. Looks like the tornadoes that I barely avoided in Atlanta while I was in San Fran were waiting for me here, copious tornado warnings on the news here.

It's kind of a mixed bag. It's cool to get away from home for a bit and, while I've been to Chicago way more than any other major city, I've never been here with full control over my itinerary. It's also a bummer though as, when I take these trips, it's always for around a week - long enough to really get to know the places, but also long enough for loneliness to set in. I'm used to being alone, so it's not like withdrawal or anything, but alone has a starker shadow when framed in the unfamiliar.

I turn 31 this week. In Chicago. As a birthday gift to myself I copped a ticket to Wednesdays Cubs / Braves game at Wrigley. I've never been to Wrigley so I'm excited about that. I think my seat is near the Steve Bartman section so that should be fun. My hotel room is nice too. Really nice. It was the cheapest one that I could find so I can only imagine what the others are like. It has a separate bedroom, two flatscreen televisions, and a full kitchen. I've been in one bedroom condos that were smaller.

Lots of other stuff has been up, but I'm tired and haven't eaten yet so I'm gonna do that. I think I'll try Harry Carey's bar which is nearby.

Before I go, I want to say congrats to my man Legend for his engagement and fast approaching wedding. I have a good feeling that he and his fiance Jennifer will end up on the sunnier side of those marriage statistics discussed in the last post.

The Great Institution (Commentary / Rants)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 5/29/2008 12:05:51 AM

A few months ago, the Institute for American Values released a report on the tax burden that divorce and unwed child bearing imposes on the American population. The projected cost was 112 billion dollars annually - and that number is conservative by their methodology. Their position is that it's in the public's fiduciary interest to keep the institution of marriage healthy, and that relatively cheap government investments aimed at preserving marriage could have a significant impact on government expenditures that are racked up while coping with the outcomes of divorce and out of wedlock children.

I think that it's a good approach to touting the benefits of marriage but, in reading the report, there seems to be a little causal confusion. It seems clear to me that marriage in and of itself isn't the real issue causing these huge expenditures, the issue is poverty and the costs of social welfare that come along with it. The marriage connection is simply the fact that adults - and, more importantly, their kids - are much less likely to live in poverty if they are married.

This begs the question of whether the problem is that marriages aren't holding up as well as they used to or if it's the fact that a single income packs a lot less bang for the buck these days. After all, the current hysteria over the state of the family is really just an acknowledgment of the fact that the "family" is not immune to the same evolutionary forces that government, religion, and all other great human institutions have to contend with. I'm sure that, at some point, no small number of people lamented the fact that wives were no longer considered the husband's property, that the advent of transportation caused families to disperse geographically where they were normally concentrated (and commanded more clout), or that people were no longer forced to stay tethered to dead relationships due to financial limitations. Boo Hoo.

The implicit assertion that investing in marriage is likely to provide a better return on investment than waging war on poverty is not one to be easily dismissed, but I think a good faith effort requires real look at the reasons why divorce happens at a much higher rate now than before. Over the last couple of years, practically every marriage of people in my peer group that I am aware of has ended in divorce or is rapidly spiraling to that conclusion. While I can't pretend to know all of the details, I've been pretty close to several of these situations and it looks like a lot of the issues in the relationships were present early on but never properly explored or outright ignored. In several cases, the issues present should have taken the idea of marriage off of the table, but social pressure for marriage seemed to override these concerns and that whole tendency to put the resolution of issues into the future was used to get to the altar with a clear conscience.

To the extent that government subsidized pre-marriage and divorce counseling can prevent these situations, I'm with it, but I have a feeling this will only help on the margins. I doubt the problem is people making so much better decisions back in the days of lower divorce rates, but moreso not having any choice but to put up with the consequences of their poor judgment (or that of their family) of a spouse. When you have no choice, you'd be amazed at how much food could keep you alive but, being alive and being healthy are two different things.

This is why I don't get bent out of shape on divorce statistics (which, incidentally, are almost always bent out of shape). Marriage is freaking hard, is it really surprising that when people have other options, they chose to opt out in higher numbers? Also, can the efficiency gained by the unprecedented matchmaking niches made possible by technology act as a countervailing force to higher divorce rates by speeding up the process of getting remarried? What really makes a relationship successful anyway? Longevity? The happiness of the participants? The perception of everybody else?

I miss Oby.

A Little Professional Advice (Commentary / Rants)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 5/21/2008 8:50:23 AM

Been fighting a bug that has slowed me down a bit, but heres a little something to keep the party going.

I'm at one of those points right now where I am having to evaluate a lot of people for the purpose of hiring. This year, I will participate in several full time hires for my own crew and sit on committees for many others. Over the last few years I have been on a large number of selection committees for positions ranging from administrative assistant to department heads with salaries ranging from $30,000 to $120,000 so I've seen a wide spectrum of candidates and selection processes. I have a few thoughts to share.

Few things surprise me more and less these days than the poor nature of most employee selection processes. Poor job analysis, badly structured interviews, arbitrary assessments are just a few of the problems that plague organizations - including mine. My rant about selection will have to come later, right now I want to vent about the selectees. My vent will come in the way of a few suggestions for you when you go job hunting - particularly technical job hunting, though this should apply to generally any professional position as well.

1) Pare down the resume

Here is a rule of thumb, unless the position that you are applying for is an executive position that's paying a salary in the top 15% for your area (this varies, but for the US it's roughly $100K - be sure to adjust for cost of living in your area) or one that requires a CV, DO NOT LET YOUR RESUME EXCEED TWO PAGES and if you can do it in one, do it in one. Another way to look at it is to estimate how many people could be applying for this job. That number is directly correlated to how specialized the position is. If it is very specialized, then you have a little more wiggle room with respect to length. If not, keep it short and sweet as a short and succinct resume will stick out more positively than a novella.

Here is some insight. A halfway competent person is evaluating you based on four things: your knowledge, skills, abilities, and "other" assets. None of this stuff should take you forever to itemize. Human beings and machines both read resumes and they use the same techniques - parsing keywords and lists. So when I look at a resume, I'm looking for training / education, what processes and technologies you've worked with, the context of that work, and how long you've worked. More specifically, have you been trained or educated on anything that we use, have you worked with anything that we use, has this work been in any meaningful context (or did you just deliver donuts for the people doing the real work), how long did all of this go on, and how well can you demonstrate competence in the things that you claim to know.

In a perfect world, a dedicated HR person would be doing this screening, but in the real world it ends up being people like me with a lot of other stuff to do. I really don't care about your hobbies and, while a cover page is nice, I would generally recommend against it unless you are an exceptional written communicator and this ability is central to the job. Remember, you're just performing a quick sell here so that you'll get a call back. When you get in the door you can pull out all of the stops.

2) Don't be afraid to talk about money

One of the most critical skills for managing human relationships is to manage expectations. For some reason, people are scared to initiate talks about money with prospective employers. Let me tell you something, if a hiring manager takes you out of the running for a job because you want to talk numbers, they probably did you a favor as this reeks of a disconnect from reality. All employers generate some sort of product or service. The primary purpose of a job is for you to exchange your skills in helping them deliver that product or service for their money. Generally, money is the primary reason that you two care about one another so talking about it should not be like pullng teeth.

If you're responding to a posting that has no salary listed, let your expectations be known early. You might save everyone a lot of time. It's enough of a hassle to read through all of these resumes, coordinate multiple busy schedules to set up interviews, and haggle over impressions for the fact that both parties are miles apart on salary to come up in the eleventh hour.

3) Don't lie on your resume

This goes doubly if you're technical. It is easy for a competent functional interviewer to tell when somebody is BSing about their experience. Also, any serious selection process will check references and ask open ended questions regarding your role in their organization. You might luck out and fake your way in, but your co-workers will pick up on your lack of competence quickly and soon you'll be stigmatized. You might think that's an acceptable price to pay in exchange for employment but, if you are staking out a career, it's a small world and your colleagues will talk, your managers will talk, and your reputation will begin to precede you.

Most resume lies are relatively small and, as such, are rarely worth the risk of getting caught - especially with verification becoming easier and easier these days. Just be honest and save yourself the mental gymnastics and potential embarrassment.

4) Do your research

I don't mean research like how big the company is and how much profit was made last quarter - that kind of stuff is cool, but unless you go out of your way to substantively link it strategically or tactically to your job or aspirations, it reeks of lame brown nosing (some employers like that so, like the rest of this, take it with a grain of salt). What I am talking about is research on the job market and what you are worth. Item #2 on this list is a heck of a lot easier if you know what your competition will be demanding salary-wise. Nothing makes a candidate look more ignorant than substantially over or under bidding for their services.

Here are resources to help with this:

Salary.com
O*NET
Payscale.com

This can get kind of tricky if, like me, you bring all kinds of peripheral abilities to the table that has value but isn't part of the job description. Make sure that you make these talents known in the interview and make a concrete case for why these assets will give you an edge in helping your prospective employer produce their product or service. Try to get as much advance information as you can on the job itself so that you can make the best tailored case. This leads me to my final item:

5) Leverage your network

Hiring is a crap shoot. If I had a nickel for every story of a bamboozle I've heard from hiring managers, I would be a rich man. There are ways to get a decent level of certainty that a person is who they say they are, but they are generally cost more to execute than they are worth for most positions and are primarily exercised for executive and other highly privileged jobs.

There is a saying that "it's not what you know it's who you know." This is very true, but be careful to not tie this up with cronyism. While cronyism is certainly a subset of this reality, the larger picture is one where people that are invested in the company and have a good idea of what the company needs knows somebody that might be a good match. This does not ensure a hire, but it does warrant a close look when somebody that has something to lose in the eyes of the company puts their reputation behind a candidate.

It works the other way too. In the last nine years I have gone to a grand total of two job interviews and got offers each time. Both of these were situations where I was not looking for a job, but a past or present co-worker that thought highly of me and my work knew of a situation that they thought would work very well for me and the employer. They were right both times.

I say all of this to say that you never know who knows who. This can kill you when you lie on your resume, but it can help you when you're an honest person that does good work. People notice this, and they will look out for you.

PODCAST: Superman that Train (Commentary / Rants)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 5/13/2008 11:54:32 AM

I am going to start doing more podcasts. My voice is an asset that I haven't developed as well as I should and podcasts are a great way to do it. You might have noticed that I've been a lot more consistent about posting around here over the last few months, this is due to some new mental processes and habits that I have gotten into that allow me to be more productive. Now it's time to move that productivity over into audio posts.

This podcast is one that I threw together last night. It sucks for a few reasons: there are glitches in the audio due to the crappy sound interface that I have on my main computer and, I'm just not used to having to prop up a conversation completely by myself. If you've ever talked to me, you know that I can dominate a conversation, but I still need something to lean on from time to time. Also, I never realized how slow I talk, it must be a really annoying to talk to me. Do I talk this slow normally? I'm posting this in all of its popping, stuttering, sucking glory just so that I have a reference point as my ability to produce these things quickly and effectively gets better. You know? You know? You know? You know?

This podcast is about a video making the rounds that I will heretofore refer to a "Souljah Girl" (SG). It's a video of a young girl that is clearly off her rocker antagonizing an old woman on a MARTA train here in Atlanta that has become the talk of the town and beyond. Her little "freestyle" is one of those things that you have to laugh at to keep from crying.

Reaction this debacle has been predictable and, as usual, I have found a lot of the (quite voluminous) commentary to be lacking in perspective. So without further ado, I present my two cents.

The Souljah Girl Podcast

UPDATE:* Looks like Souljah Girl is getting some help. Commentary from her family.

* I have this as an update on the initial publishing of this post because at the time I recorded the podcast I was not aware of this detail.

Double Feature (Entertainment)

Rashid Z. Muhamma — 5/11/2008 11:40:28 PM

Iron Man - 4 out of 5

When I heard that an Iron Man film was going into production, I was a little worried. Ok, a lot worried. For a long time, Iron Man was my favorite comic book character. His throne was safe until Frank Miller totally kicked my ass with The Dark Knight Returns. Still, my worry wasn't so much about story, but about the suit itself. Iron Man's suit and capabilities were just exotic enough for somebody to try to create some computer generated abomination. As it turned out, my worries were for naught as Iron Man's transition to the big screen has to be one of the most triumphant ever.

No factor helps the film more than the casting of Robert Downey Jr. Downey completely owns this film - nailing the role of Tony Stark. The last couple of times I saw him were in Zodiac and A Scanner Darkly with him delivering memorable performances on both fronts, begging for a vehicle of his own. I can't say that playing a comic book superhero would be the turn that I expected, but he takes it and runs - errr - flies. The other star of the show is somebody that most people aren't familiar with, but has a long history of keeping movies requiring machines from turning into CG suckfests: Stan Winston. His Iron Man suit design is top notch.

I'm not going to get into a lot of detail, but I will say that the film does do the Iron Man myth justice. There were liberties taken with a few parts of the story, but they were acceptable given the task of fitting the genesis of a character with such a highly technical nature into a film for general consumption. Nowhere was there anything as ridiculous as turning Spiderman into a web generating mutant (a bastardization of the character that interestingly undermines the connection between Peter Parker and Tony Stark as highly intelligent teenagers). If you want to see a film right now that the whole family can enjoy without having to turn off part of your brain, Iron Man is the one to see.

Stay through the credits, there are a couple of cool things that come up.

Speed Racer - 3 out of 5

I'd like to say that you can enjoy the Wachowski Brothers new film, Speed Racer, without having to turn parts of your brain off (actually, if you're one for epileptic fits, Speed Racer might end up turning parts of your brain off for you without your consent). While the film is a triumph in technical film making producing a film-going experience that is unquestionably unique and awe-inspiring, it's clear that the proceedings are aimed at young kids and, as such, require much more a suspension of belief than the multi-layered Iron Man.

I was never a big fan of the cartoon, so I can't say much about how faithful the film is to the source material. I can say the film is way too long. I am not one to harp on running times, but two hours and fifteen minutes is overkill for the types of attention spans in play here. I was personally into the story the whole way through but there is such juvenile tedium revolving around Speed's (yes, that is his name) younger brother and pet monkey that those sequences alone might account for an extra thirty minutes of running time fat.

The funny thing is, the film has a flimsy story, but the Wachowski Brothers are intent on telling it in as cool a way as possible. They generally do okay here, but at various points they really get ahead of themselves. There is this one temporal trick that they used in their criminally underrated debut film Bound and later in The Matrix Reloaded where they have a character explain a situation in the future that you see play out as it is being described and when the description is over the film moves to the period after this event has completed. Its a cool trick, but it is really confusing if you don't know what's going on and was a bit much for this PG-rated popcorn flick.

As an aside, I will never understand why people spend all of this money on these computer generated effects just to slice and dice them with such spastic editing that it's not only hard to appreciate the digital handiwork, but next to impossible to figure out what's happening on screen. This was a big problem for me when watching Transformers and is even more so here because there is so much color and the shots are all pretty much in full focus. If this has something to do with the attention span of kids, I would humbly submit that the running time would be a much better pander to this sensibility than editing the film into a blur.

With all of that said, there is lots of technical brilliance in the production and the opening scene is particularly well-done. The CG effects are incredible and each sequence is bursting at the seams with creativity. It's not a complete exercise of simple form over function as there is a cynical commentary on corporatization of competition there if you want to see it, but it doesn't offer anything particularly poignant or insightful (and, like most of the film, doesn't seem to be targeted at anyone over twelve years old) so if you just relax and enjoy the two hour orgy of color for the raw escapism that it is, I think you'll have a good time. The revamped theme song - scored during the movie and played in full during the closing credits - is really really catchy.